Josie
Here’s the thing with dreams--and I’m talking about the kind you have when you sleep, not the kind where you’re finally learning to surf when you’re fifty: they’re carefully tailored to the only audience who will ever see them, which is you. So I’m not big on telling people about my dreams for that reason.
That said, there’s this recurring dream I have. It comes around every couple of months or so, but I wish it were more often because it’s awesome, and when I wake up from it, I lie there for a few moments, wishing I could reenter it. In this dream, I’m at a familiar place. Often it’s my grandma’s house.
Her house was tiny. It always smelled like quilts and oatmeal cookies and that musty odor when you first turn on a window-unit air conditioner after winter. It had a cellar that smelled like cold dirt even during the summer, where she kept store-brand cans of creamed corn, jars of home-pickled dilly beans, and two-liter bottles of Diet Coke. In my dream, I descend into the cellar. I find a door leading to a passageway. I go in. I follow it for a long way; it’s cool and dark, and I’m not afraid. Eventually it opens into this grand, palatial, brightly lit marble room. There are columns and fountains, and the air smells like flowers. I push forward and find room after room. It’s all grand and glorious, beautiful and perfect. It’s not what you would expect to find.
But there it is, and for those few minutes (I’ve heard that dreams are never more than five minutes long, which I totally don’t believe, but whatever), you get to experience the most unexpected grandeur, running like a rabbit warren under my grandma’s little house in Jackson, Tennessee.
And then I wake up, the thrill of possibility and discovery drifting upward off me like steam. It’s such a delicious feeling. Just stay a little longer, I say. But it doesn’t.
Yet another reason it sucks to tell people about your dreams is that then they suddenly become amateur dream interpretation experts: [Nondescript German psychiatrist voice] Well, you see, when you were riding that bicycle made out of fish sticks while wearing an adult diaper, it symbolizes . . . That you’re afraid of failure. That you’re filled with seething rage. That you’re afraid to become such a grown-up that you no longer call fish sticks “fish dicks.” Who knows?
But dreams are their own universe. They exist in you, and you’re the God of that universe, so no one can tell you what they mean. You have to figure it out, assuming dreams have any meaning at all, which I think they only sometimes do.
This dream, though--the one about finding all the hidden rooms--I think it does mean something. I think it means there’s something great inside me, something extraordinary and mysterious and undiscovered.
That’s a thing I tell myself. It’s a thing I believe.
Copyright © 2019 by Jeff Zentner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
